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Apple Pie
1 recipe for plain paste 5 or 6 apples 1/2 cup sugar 1 teaspoon shortening 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon few gratings nutmeg Divide the paste, line the plate, prepare the top sheet. Pare, core and cut the apples into eighths. Pile into pie pan as high above the edge as the bottom of the plate is below. Add sugar and spices mixed together, dot with shortening, brush the rim of paste with cold water. Lay the top paste over and press edges together firmly. Bake 40 to 45 minutes in moderate oven (375 degrees). This will make one pie.
A straightforward two-crust apple pie whose only unusual instruction concerns the height of the filling. A few of the terms need translating.
- Plain pasteThis is the book's basic pie pastry, given elsewhere in the book; the quantity called for here is enough for a double crust. Any standard all-butter or shortening pastry for a 9-inch pie will do.
- "Line the plate"The pie plate, not a dinner plate. In this period a pie was baked in a shallow tin or glass plate, commonly around 8 or 9 inches across; the phrase simply means fitting the bottom crust into it.
- The mounding instructionPiling the apples as far above the rim as the plate is deep is the hinge of the recipe. Apples cook down considerably in the oven, and without the mound the top crust collapses into a hollow dome over a thin layer of fruit.
- OvenThe recipe prints 375F, its "moderate oven." Some modern bakers prefer to start a fruit pie hotter, around 425F for the first 15 minutes, before dropping to 375F, but the printed temperature will work.
- ShorteningOne teaspoon dotted over the fruit is a token amount; butter is the usual modern choice and a tablespoon is not excessive. Its purpose is richness, not thickening.
- Apples and sugarFive or six apples means cooking apples of the day, roughly 2 lb or so once pared and cored. Half a cup of sugar suits a tart variety such as Granny Smith or Bramley; with sweeter supermarket apples cut it back.
- No thickenerThere is no flour or cornstarch here, so the juices stay loose. Bake on a sheet pan to catch overflow and let the pie cool at least two hours before cutting, or the filling will run.
- DonenessJudge by the juice bubbling thickly through the vents and a paring knife sliding into the fruit without resistance, rather than by the clock alone.
- YieldOne pie, six to eight servings.
Apple pie under a full double crust was long established as an American standard by the later nineteenth century. Apples were among the few fruits a household could count on having in good condition in late December, laid down in barrels or a cool cellar from the autumn picking. The spicing here, cinnamon with a few gratings of nutmeg, is the conservative pairing that runs through American cookbooks of the period, and the call to grate the nutmeg reflects a time when the whole nut was kept with a small grater among the spices. The recipe's terse, formula-like layout, with ingredients listed as a block, is typical of the standardized-measurement teaching style that spread through American cookery writing after the 1890s.